Blog FeedCorporate Strangle
As gaming becomes increasingly popular it also starts becoming very strict. Once games were born in garages between friends, now they are planned out with full marketing campaigns in board rooms. While this is the natural evolution for most things that start small (windows anyone?) its sometimes hard to view current situations without a bit of longing for a less restricted environment.
What I am getting at is two recent events involving “remakes” of past games. One is the Doom 3 mod remaking System Shock 2, formally named SS2: Rebooted. The other is Chrono Resurrection, a Chrono Trigger remake.
System Shock 2: Rebooted being canceled was indeed a big let down but the Chrono remake strikes me as devastating. SS2:R was barely into production, just some concept art and a few models were completed so nobody had huge amounts of time and energy wasted. Chrono Resurrection on the other hand had quite a foothold of work completed. If you look at the remaining site you will see a good amount of screenshots and a well done video. All of this stuff looks professional quality and better than some current games on the market.
I would be more understanding of the situation if the companies that own the rights to the series had a similiar project in development but in these cases there is none. It is highly unlikely that we will ever see another System Shock game. The Chrono line gets sequels but a remake of the classic is probably never going to happen. Why don’t companies allow such things? Or perhaps work out a deal with the modders where they have to approve the final build if they don’t want the series reputation “tarnished”. I am sure there is some in-between that could be arranged rather than just a flat out “no”. As long as the remake is of good quality it can only benefit the company. Right?
19th March | Reply
A guy I know of, who now works as a graphics designer for Io Interactive (think: Hitman) planned to make a full-conversion mod for Half-Life based on Aliens. This was all quite some time ago, but he received a Cease and Desist from Fox. Bit of a shame, but nothing like the waste which I see the Chrono Resurrection project turning into now. There is some serious skill in that group of people, and looking over their site I am very impressed.
But if Square said such a thing was OK, it could well come back to haunt them later on. We don’t know if they ever plan to make a new game on future platforms that uses the same title.
20th March | Reply
Thats why mod makers should stop using ‘brand names’ and such. Even though I dont know how to (yet), I would really love to see a Ravenshield 3: Source. And I’d make it if I could. But I wouldnt name it Ravenshield 3: Source. Just call it something else, it may be completely identical, but really there’s only so many ways you can make a co-op terrorist shooter game
Everyone would know its basically RvS, except that the original makers cant do anything about it 
20th March | Reply
With Ravenshield it is possible to do that because Red Storm does not own the Intellectual Property of “real life”. All the guns used and such are not original works from within the company. The only trouble you can get into is if you copied maps. I know it extends further than just the name. If you use anything original from the game you usually get the big cease and desist. I think what caused the SS2:Rebooted project to be shut down was when they put up a model of a wrench that had something written on it that was written on the wrench in the original game.
21st March | Reply
Welcome to the Corporate world of today, people, where Intellectual law is used as a weapon against anyone who even think about ideas not their own. Copyright law is bullshit, and the whole world is going to find how f*cked it is in the coming years where the little man is at the mercy of those big groups with money to throw about.
Wonderful.
-TigZy
4th April | Reply
I started working on SS:R about a week into production. I was the only modeler at the time and was working for a great bunch of concept artists/coders and management from around thw world. We were all there because we loved SystemShock and wanted to see it hit the world again via the Doom3 engine.
Some people have called us retarded for even thinking of using copyrighted material for a mod, and this may be true. But the thing that really erked me was the manner of our shutdown by EA. Out of the blue our webmaster was threatened by EA lawyers to immediatly cease all action or suffer the consequences. He was personally threatened by numerous phone calls etc etc.
THAT is the bullshit side of this, a simple e-mail informing us of the copyright issue (including links to where this copyright was and what it covered) would of been more then enough to make us reconsider.
Not all is lost out of this though, out team reformed and gathered new blood and we are currently in production of a total conversion for Doom3 called sapphire scar. now located at www.sapphirescar.com we in the begining production stages of both full singleplayer and multiplayer content.
Regards